Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society.Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in...

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than everFew could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself inclu...

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic cris...

Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). Pérez Melgosa analyzes the evolution of inter-American narratives in films from across the continent, highlights the social effects of the technologies used to produce these works, and explores the connections of cinema to su...

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.Ian Buruma is fascinated, he writes, “by what makes the human species behave atrociously.” In Theater of Cruelty the acclaimed author of The Wages of Guilt and Year Zero: A History of 1945 once again turns to World War II to explore that question—to the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Allied bombing of German cities, the international controversies over Anne Frank’s diaries, Japan’s mil...

Immortal Comedy is the first book to 'think' philosophically about the comic phenomenon in general. Although author Agnes Heller had written a book that is both deeply scholarly and meditative on the subject of the comic form in film, literature, and life her writing is eminently approachable. In both its subject and style, Immortal Comedy is a seminal book. In it, Heller takes us on a journey through theories of comedy beginning with classical thought. She then detours through foundationa...

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as ‘meaning’, ‘form’ or ‘expression’ apply to computer art?A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as ‘interactivity’ and ‘user’.Drawing on...

Across a broad spectrum of media, markets, and national contexts, self-reflexivity continues to be a favored narrative mode with wide ranging functions. In this book Amago argues that, in addition to making visible industry and production concerns within the film text, reflexive aesthetics have a cartographic function that serves to map the place of a film (geographic and cultural) within the global cinemascape, and thus to bring into sharper relief images of the national. Focusing on film...

The first book to unpack American cinema's long history of representing death, this work considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Reading attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voiceover or images of medical technology, C. Scott Combs connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth century. He looks at Thomas Edison's E...

Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainm...

Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts practices. Each contribution synthesizes creative approaches to philosophy and new materialist understanding of practice to show how human-nonhuman interaction at the core of Arts practice is a critical post human pedagogy.Across fine art, dance, gallery education, film and philosophy, the book contends that certain kinds of Arts practice can be a critical pedagogy in which tactical engagem...

D’ARS Magazine è una collana in formato ePub che dal 2014 offre al pubblico una raccolta di articoli tratti da D’ARS - periodico di arti e culture contemporanee in due lingue (italiano e inglese).Diretto da Cristina Trivellin, D’ARS propone un approccio sincretico alle arti e alle culture contemporanee, spaziando tra i vari linguaggi in un ideale filo rosso che lega arti visive, filosofia, letteratura, teatro, cinema, musica, fotografia, architettura e studia le intersezioni tra art...